The 2017 Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting drew to a close on Sunday with panels on topics ranging from “Games and History Learning: ‘Mission US’” to “Who’s Teaching the Kids: Charter Schools and American Public Education” to “Toward a New Remembering of the Black Freedom Movement: A State of the Field Conversation.”
As the exhibit hall was dismantled on Saturday, OAH and Paramount exhibition services staffers collected and boxed up books donated by participating publishers. For fifteen years, the OAH and its local resource committees have facilitated the donation of hundreds of gently used display copies to a local library at the close of each conference through the OAH Book Bridge Program. This year’s recipients of the Book Bridge donation are the New Orleans Public Library (hardcovers) and Louisiana Books 2 Prisoners (paperbacks). Many thanks to the participating publishers for sharing the best in current U.S. history research with these local audiences!
For more on the history of the Book Bridge program check out our post on the topic.
As we conclude coverage of the OAH 2017 meeting and bid farewell to New Orleans, we invite you to look forward to the 2018 meeting in Sacramento. The theme, “Forms of History,” invites participants to think about the many forms that the presentation of history takes and encourages them to move beyond the traditional reading of conference papers during their sessions. Through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the OAH will record audio from all sessions and conduct video interviews with select participants. The OAH seeks to amplify the reach of the Annual Meeting and will partner with other groups to make the content from the 2018 meeting more widely available. For more information about the 2018 meeting and the Amplified Initiative, please visit our call for proposals.
